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For St. Isidore, see the De Ordine Creaturarum, cap v, in Migne, Patr. Lat., lxxxiii, pp. 923-925; also 1000, 1001. For Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, chap. cxxxiii, in Migne, tome xii, p. 1264. For Cosmas's view, see his Topographia Christiana, in Montfaucon, Col. Nov. Patrum, ii, p. 150, and elsewhere as cited in my chapter on Geography. This doctrine was of the highest respectability: it had been developed at a very early period, and had been elaborated until it accounted well for the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies; its final name, "Ptolemaic theory," carried weight; and, having thus come from antiquity into the Christian world, St. Clement of Alexandria demonstrated that the altar in the Jewish tabernacle was "a symbol of the earth placed in the middle of the universe": nothing more was needed; the geocentric theory was fully adopted by the Church and universally held to agree with the letter and spirit of Scripture.(41) (41) As to the respectibility of the geocentric theory, etc., see Grote's Plato, vol. iii, p. 257; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, chap. iii, sec. 1, for a very thoughtful statement of Plato's view, and differing from ancient statements. For plausible elaboration of it, and for supposed agreement of the Scripture with it, see Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, Antwerp, 1631; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrinae Physicae. For an admirable statement of the theological view of the geocentric theory, antipodes, etc., see Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, pp. 618 et seq. Wrought into this foundation, and based upon it, there was developed in the Middle Ages, mainly out of fragments of Chaldean and other early theories preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, a new sacred system of astronomy, which became one of the great treasures of the universal

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